


The Lengths

by 148km



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate season 8, Gen, M/M, season 6, season 7
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 08:33:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/607869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/148km/pseuds/148km
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a face seared behind Nick's eyelids and a name upon his lips that sounds more familiar to him than his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lengths

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry, I'm doing that thing again where I bully myself into posting something unfinished so I don't just sit on it forever and never post it. (For example, there won't be any Sam in this for a while still, but I wanted to get it posted some time this year because I've been working on it for months and have only managed a couple thousand words.) Not explicitly canon-divergent until season 8, but we'll get there when we get there.

Nick wakes up feeling like he's been asleep for a year.  (In a way, he has.)

Once his eyes come into focus, he realizes that he's in a hospital and it doesn't even occur to him to find that strange.  He doesn't even realize that he's in pain, at first.  (He will, eventually.)

The first thing that Nick's sleep-addled brain puts together (and what ultimately sends him into the panic attack that gets the nurse's attention) is that Lucifer is gone and his wife is gone and their baby is gone and _Lucifer is gone_.

```

Normally, the doctors tell him, they wouldn't keep him hospitalized if it were just the facial injuries—mysterious as they are, the doctor assures him that they'll heal with minimal scarring.  They keep him under observation because he's experiencing serious withdrawal symptoms and they can't for the life of them figure out which substance he'd been using.  (They _do_ ask him if he normally eats a lot of red meat and tell him to eat less.)

Nick tells them he can't remember, which is at least sort of true.  He's careful not to tell them anything, because without Lucifer riding in his skin, he can't tell which ones are demons in disguise and which ones are normal, _human_ , unhelpful quacks.  He doesn't even tell them his real name or birthdate, even though he has great health insurance.  Or had, anyway.  He's pretty sure you get dropped from things like that after you go missing for months.

Before all this, he would've worried himself into a early grave about footing the hospital bill, about whether or not he still owned his house, about his job, about what he was going to tell his friends and relations.  But if there's one thing he learned from his time as Lucifer's vessel, it's that there's a way to do things unconventionally (which is to say _unlawfully_ ).

Lucifer only spoke to him rarely—he was kind in a way, but had mostly ignored him.  Nick's consciousness was barely a blip on the angel's radar.  He was free to observe, if he could.  Sometimes he couldn't.  Some things Lucifer kept from him.  Others he shared openly.  But there was one thing, one pressing, urgent, _all-consuming_ thing that Lucifer couldn't have kept from him if he'd tried.  There's a face seared behind Nick's eyelids and a name upon his lips that sounds more familiar to him than his own.

His plan is to find Sam Winchester.

```

He leaves the hospital before he's officially discharged—it's not as difficult as he anticipated.  He's not really worried about anyone looking for him, except maybe demons.  He's a little worried about that possibility, to be honest, but one learns a thing or two from being an archangel's vessel.  (Namely, he knows that he's no one special to Heaven or Hell now—if anyone is looking for _Lucifer's vessel_ , he's not the one they'll be trying to find.)

Nick remembers certain details about Sam Winchester—he remembers them tumbling out of his own mouth like a mantra, though he hadn't been the one speaking.  What he needs to do, he decides, is some homework.  He uses a public library computer to learn how to hot-wire a car.  He momentarily feels bad about it, but soon discovers that, like most everything else inside him, the emotion is brittle and dead and turns to ash at the touch.

He researches house fires in Lawrence, Kansas in 1983.  He finally learns the actual rules of poker.  He teaches himself how to hack a database (the librarian catches him looking this up once and he tells her it's research for a book he's writing).  He peruses lists of Stanford graduates even though he knows Sam never graduated.

It's truly a beautiful day when he finally gets good enough at poker to use some of the winnings on a motel rather than sleeping on a park bench.  (Truthfully, he's still not that good, but Sarah had always told him he had an unbeatable pokerface.)  He buys some new socks and underwear and gives himself a much-needed shave.

"The one thing I really miss about being a vessel," he says to no one in particular, stretched out contentedly on the motel bed, "is never having to do laundry."

The other thing he misses is the company.  Lucifer mostly ignored him, but if he stayed awake, it was impossible to truly feel alone.

"Fuck laundry," Nick adds for emphasis before rolling over and falling asleep.

```

The best way to find hunters, he thinks, is probably to ask other hunters, which is how he finds himself sneaking into a graveyard late at night to salt and burn a corpse.  And _god_ , is graveyard security tight these days.  It takes a couple hours of ducking behind headstones and being very careful about his growing dirt pile every time the security van drives by for him to reach the coffin, but once the heavy lifting is done it's really not as gross as he would've imagined.  The smell is awful and everything, but he's seen some pretty messed up stuff before.

Truth be told, he's completely out of his element.  Angels don't really concern themselves with nonhuman entities, apart from the occasional demon smiting—Lucifer's knowledge there is really no help to him.  He's got about six thousand years' worth of lore to catch up on, and he's so physically out of shape, it's embarrassing.  Still, every hunter starts somewhere.

As soon as the corpse really catches (not enough lighter fluid, this corpse is too fresh), Nick runs for all he's worth, keeping to the shadows and occasionally tripping over headstones.  He imagines the Winchesters look cooler when they roast a corpse.  Probably say something witty, too.  God _dammit_ , those smooth jerks.  And here Nick is, in his mid-forties, developing a beer gut and stiff joints and hiding from glorified security guards behind gravestones.

```

The Apocalypse obviously hasn't happened, and word is that Dean Winchester is retired nowadays.  But Sam—Sam's another story.  There's a lot of talk, and most of it's pretty bleak.  Some accounts leave him dead ("In Hell where he belongs, he started the damn thing!"), others as a ruthless, blood-sucking vampire.  Nick suspects that hunters that actually know Sam might say different things now that the panic is over, but the ones who knew him well are all dead (unsurprisingly).

He keeps an eye out and his ears open.

Mostly, he hears about strange new monsters appearing in unexpected areas.  He doesn't think much of it at first—people immigrate, what's stopping their monsters from coming along with them?  It's uncommon (or so he gathers) but not truly weird until he and a small gang of hunters stumble on a nest of no-one-even-knows-what.  Nick is used to weird, but these monsters top the bill.  They look _awkward_ , with limbs all bent out of shape and with razor sharp claws and teeth coming out of every orifice and extending from every digit.  They manage to kill their way out of the nest (salted and burned for good measure), and they're alive but this is the most shaken Nick has ever seen any seasoned hunter.

"What the hell were those things?"

"They—they almost remind me of those overkill monsters the goth kids would write about in your high school English class," Nick offers.  It's been almost thirty years and he couldn't forget about Jennifer Paxton's half-vampire, half-werewolf character named Sebastian Lyle Emery Ravensbane, about whom she wrote every creative writing assignment, of which she was quite proud and often volunteered to read aloud to the class.  "You know?"

The rest of the group falls silent and gives him this look, like _no, we don't know what you mean, you fucking weirdo_.

There's a surge in monster activity, particularly of the extra weird variety.  Nick is in a state of hypomania; the Winchesters are _bound_ to make an appearance.  Then, all at once, they're all dead.  Hunters would storm a place for a raid, only to find the place covered in blood and gore and a fine dusting of sulfur.   _Demons_.

Demons doing their jobs for them makes hunters uneasy, but at least that's one less horde of monsters to worry about.  Nick tries to swallow his disappointment by channeling his energy into figuring out what the demons are up to—that's a more likely lead to finding the Winchesters than random monster nest raids, surely.  Mostly, he collects data.  He knows how to trap a demon, sure, but he's not certain he has the huevos to torture one for information, and even if he exorcised it, the damn thing would go back to Hell and tell all its little buddies about Lucifer's old vessel.  Too dangerous, too dangerous.

In the end, he doesn't have the resources to fit all the pieces together.  It's incredibly frustrating.  When it finally dawns on him that he's never going to get anywhere with this, Nick gets spectacularly drunk and does something it would never otherwise have occurred to him to do.

He prays.

"Lucifer," he says, half a whisper.  It's the first time he's said that name since before that night in Delaware.  Nick is fully aware of the irony of praying to the Devil, but at least he knows that Lucifer exists.  His prayer really is nothing more than some sad, drunken rambling, but he feels a little less lonely when he's finished.

```

He finds her late the next night, or maybe she finds him.  This is what he gets for praying to _Lucifer_ , of all things.

"Well, well, well…"  She crosses her arms and raises one perfectly shaped eyebrow.  "If it isn't Daddy's First Meatsuit."

"Meg," Nick says evenly, careful not to react.  Meg had been one of Lucifer's most faithful servants, and with Hell under new management, she could be a potential ally.  But if he's misjudged her, he's way out of his league.  He doesn't know much about exorcising demons—what he'd learned from Lucifer was mostly how to play them or smite them, and he has neither the physical power nor the leverage to do either.

"I have to admit, I'm a little surprised to see you breathing," she drawls.  "I'd've figured the Winchesters would've knifed you, just in case."

He shrugs.  "I think they may have had some more pressing concerns at the time.  I don't think they know I'm alive."

"Now I kinda wish I'd asked them."  Meg tilts her head and studies him for a minute, like she's trying to decide whether or not to kill him.  "I'll bet you know all kinds of secrets about Him."

"I know I'm not his true vessel," he replies flatly.  He's not certain that's a point in his favor.

"No, but you wanted Him."  It's not a question and Nick doesn't answer.  "We should stick together.  Most demons these days serve the usurper and they'd serve you up to him on a silver platter."

"Why should I trust you over them?"

"Because," she says tersely, "deep down, you and I both want the same thing, and I can't do it by myself, but together we might have a shot."

Nick stares at her impassively.  He really doesn't know what he wants.

"I'm talking about raising Lucifer from Hell, you moron."

Realization hits him like a brick.  He's not sure he agrees with her, but at least this means she won't be killing him in the immediate future.  "How?"

"You're a vessel," she says stubbornly.  "There's some kind of psychic connection or whatever.  There has to be a way to swing it."

He can tell by the tremor in Meg's voice that she's not even sure she believes it.  Nick isn't sure that she's right about them wanting the same thing, either.  But she's desperate and that gives him an edge.

"Maybe.  But I don't think there'll be any raising going on without one or both of the Winchesters."

Meg purses her lips in annoyance.  "You're gonna have a hell of a time trying to get that kid to fall for the same trick twice."

Nick resists the urge to smirk—he knows what Lucifer would say to _that_.  "I haven't agreed to help you."

"I think you will.  People don't take up hunting nightmares for the fun of it.  And you?  You don't even have thoughts of revenge to keep you warm at night.  You got into the business because you're looking for someone.

"You're gonna help me because I can get you Sam Winchester."

```

When dealing with a demon, it pays to be as nonspecific as possible when it comes to holding up your end of the bargain.  Nick knows that, but even so, Meg is craftier than he’d anticipated.  She leaves him without any way to reach her, or vice versa, which makes him incredibly nervous.  He doesn’t like the idea that she knows how to find him and he has no way of knowing when she’ll decide to drop in, or how to keep her from finding him, short of salting every door and window.  He doubts Meg wants him dead—she would _definitely_ have killed him already if that were the case—but he also firmly believes that she would do it in a second if it benefitted her.

Nick doesn't hear from her for several weeks, until one unspectacular evening that he returns to his motel room and finds her leaning against the counter of the kitchenette.  He puts his duffel bag down and regards her silently, face grim but attentive.

"Hi, Meg, nice to see you," she prompts sarcastically.  When he doesn't take the bait, she rolls her eyes and says, "There's good news and bad news. Or maybe not _bad_ , maybe just... news. I just saw the Winchesters."

"And...?"  Nick takes a few cautious steps toward her.

"Well, I'll tell you what's _definitely_ bad news—they stole my magic, demon-killing knife."  Nick remembers that knife.  He's not sure who's stealing it from whom anymore.  "Also Sam's missing his soul."

"What."

Meg shrugs.  "Lost it coming out of Hell, apparently."

Nick feels his heart plunge into his stomach.  He'd known in his gut that Lucifer had returned to Hell, but had never really questioned that knowledge.  He'd never actually thought about how or why Lucifer was back in the Cage.  It seems obvious now that it had something to do with the Winchesters.  He shudders—Lucifer had been kind enough in his own way when he walked the earth, and Nick can't really imagine that Lucifer would ever really hurt his intended vessel, but he knows better than most that Hell hath no fury like _the fucking devil_ , especially if you're the one who put him there.

"Anyway, the _good_ news is that Crowley is dead," she continues without missing a beat.  "And Sam seems to want to get his soul back, which is rotting away down in the Pit."

"So you think he might want to work with us?"  Nick asks reluctantly.  He's not entirely sure what it means, not having a soul.  But it doesn't sound pleasant.  Theoretically, a soul is what makes you _you_ —and he's not certain he wants to meet this not-quite-Sam if that's the case.

"Maybe.  I don't know that he genuinely wants it back or if he's just humoring that pigheaded brother of his.  It's impossible to tell this way, he's a total wild card."  Meg frowns.  "And he doesn't seem desperate enough.  I don't think I can trust him as far as I can throw him, and that's pretty far.  I liked him better with a soul and a conscience and all that blah blah."

That makes sense.  If having no soul has made Sam cold and unpredictable, what's to stop him from just turning around and stabbing Meg with that magic knife and ridding the world of one more demon, even if she is helping him?

"Well, this certainly puts a dent in your plans."

"Well, that's only if he doesn't get his soul back."

He finds himself nodding in agreement before realizing he doesn't understand the connection.  "Wait, what?"

"Listen, kiddo," Meg sighs.  "You might think you know Lucifer, but you've never been to Hell. Demons don't even like it down there.  Angel or not, it really does a number on you.  Why do you think God put so many locks on Lucifer's Cage, and why do you think He was so happy to get out?"

"Well, 'better to rule in Hell,' and all that..."

Meg makes a face at him.  "Did you even _read_ Paradise Lost?"

"In high school," Nick mumbles.

"Well, next time you wanna talk shallow literary analyses with me, you might wanna keep in mind that _I've been there_ before I bust your kneecaps."

Nick puts his hands up in surrender.  "Right, I defer to your superior knowledge."

"Thanks," she says sarcastically, hands on her hips.  "Anyway, if Sam gets his soul back, you can pretty much guarantee there's gonna be damage, damage that Dean's not gonna understand.  And when Sam's damage becomes too much for his brother to deal with, and it always does, Sam's gonna need someone else to turn to.  Someone who understands the impact that kind of thing can have on a guy."

"You?"

"God give me the strength not to smack this dumbass standing in front of me," she says, hands clasped together in a mockery of prayer.  "Not _Hell_ , you Neanderthal.  The Cage is practically a world apart.   _Lucifer_."

Nick suppresses a shudder because suddenly he knows exactly what she means.  He can't really remember what finally convinced him to let Lucifer walk around in his skin—he knows his first reaction was less than favorable—but he'd made an impression, and now that Lucifer is out of his life, he can't remember what he was like before he was a vessel.  "Oh."

"I'll keep an eye out," Meg says slowly.  "Catch you later."

He's not sure how long Meg's been gone (he's not sure if she's actually gone because he has a vivid mental image of her watching him in disgust and calling him pathetic) before he's on the bed (he doesn't remember lying down), laughing dryly at the ceiling.   _Haha, my life is so empty, hahahaha._

He laughs until he feels nauseous but he keeps laughing anyway because his life is one big cosmic joke.  He and Sam Winchester have that in common.

```

It's tough, doing this alone, but he likes it this way.  At least that's what he tells himself.

Meg's sporadic visits are few and far between, but under the layers of mutual distrust and the knowledge that she's killed people for fun, he actually sort of likes her.  These days, when they discuss strategies, they do it over a bottle or six of beer.  (Meg can drink him under the table, it's almost not even fun.)

It's nice to pretend that he has a friend.

"So what's the story on Sam's soul?"

Meg shrugs.  "I hear talk, but nothing for sure."

"You haven't seen them?"  Nick asks, frowning.

"We're not exactly BFFs," she reminds him.

"But you can find them...?  I mean, you had no problem sniffing _me_ out."

"I can find _you_ because you don't know how to make hex bags," she says mockingly.  He notes that she's not offering to teach him.  "Not that I'd have to rely on witchcraft to find you.  Magic was never really my thing."

"Let me guess: torture and extortion?"

"What can I say."  She shrugs and takes a swig from her bottle.  "I'm an old-fashioned gal."

```

Nick spends the next several days researching hex bags and trying to figure out how to make one that will shield from demons.  The ingredients aren't all that gruesome, he supposes he could do it if he had to.  He doesn't make one, but he files the information away for later, just in case.

He spends his days doing some small cases and waiting for Meg to find him—he has some questions for her, especially since honest-to-god hunts are frustratingly few and far between.  He's drawn up graphs and everything; a full 86% of hunts he's been on in the past three months have been hunters walking in to find that the monsters have been slaughtered, and 98% of those hunts were flesh and blood monsters (Nick _hates_ hunting ghosts—he still hasn't mastered the whole graveyard thing), and not just your garden variety creepy crawlies, either.  It's a disturbing phenomenon, and throwing himself into the puzzle is a welcome distraction from—well, everything.

He's been having some strange dreams lately.  Usually, he's too tired from a hunt to remember much in the way of dreams, but these have been so weird and disturbing, Nick finds himself thinking about them when he isn't crunching the numbers on his Demonic Activity project.  There's dark and blood and screams and he thinks it might be Hell but he's not sure because Lucifer isn't there, is never there beyond the constant suspicion that he's lurking just beneath the surface but if you were to peel the surface back he would be recede like a shadow.  And there's Sam Winchester.  Sam is a recurring character in these dreams, which would be weird in of itself if Nick couldn't admit that he was maybe becoming a little bit obsessed.  Dream Sam is always an ally, a friend, a fellow escaped inmate—someone Nick can trust.  Someone he _knows_ and maybe even loves.

He doesn't particularly want to share this with Meg of all people, but he's got no one else and really, what if it means something?

So when Meg comes by a few weeks later (and he's _still_ having these dreams), he tells her about one he had recently and realizes half way through recounting it that it makes no sense, has no actual narrative quality, and actually sounds pretty boring.

He gets his confirmation when Meg raises an eyebrow and says, "Well, while you've been having creepy stalker sex dreams about little Sammy, I've been doing some _actual_ work."

"I've been doing that, too," he mumbles, feeling his ears go red.  He wouldn't call them _sex dreams_ , really, and he'd specifically repressed the memory of that One Dream where yes okay maybe they had kind of had sex.  "I just thought—maybe it meant something."

Meg stares at him incredulously.  "Uh, yeah, it means you have a crush, Pollyanna.  Now can I say what I came here to tell you or do you expect me to ask you about all the raunchy details of your weird homoerotic dreams?"

"Um, so, demons h—"

"Demons are running raids on monster nests and killing most of them but taking prisoners sometimes, which was Crowley's game before that angel roasted his bones.  I'm not sure what he was after, but he's dead now, so onto point two: Sam's got his soul back."

"What does that mean for us?"  Nick asks quietly.

"Well, aside from the fact that you can probably kiss those crazy animal sex fantasies goodbye," Meg says snidely, "we probably just lost our best bet at cracking the Cage open."

"You don't think he might…"

"As far as I can tell, he doesn't _remember_ Hell, but—no, absolutely not, not even likely at all.  We're on our own.  But _luckily_ , we were going to need to this spell whether we had Sam's help or not.  So we're not totally lost."

"We just have to hope that Lucifer's bond with me is strong enough?"

"Probably."

"And how certain are we that it'll even work?"

"Not very," she admits.  "Think of it as a science experiment.  The worst that can happen is that we accidentally release Michael instead and he smites us for our trouble."

"So no pressure."  After a while, Nick sighs and asks, "So what do you need from me?"

"Don't worry, honey, I made up a grocery list for you.  You just show up with all the ingredients and I'll take care of the rest."  She hands him a slip of—what the fuck is this, _parchment_?—and before he can even look up to ask her about it, she's gone.

The list is a lot less Satanic™ than he expected.  It calls for a ready vessel ( _Check_ , he thinks wryly) and surprisingly no blood sacrifices.  He has to meet Meg with all the supplies somewhere in Ilchester, Maryland, but for some reason that seems to make perfect sense to him.  He's never been there, but it somehow seems familiar.

Nick doesn't remember really having agreed to host Lucifer again, but he doesn't know what else to do.  The spell probably won't even succeed and he can get back on track.  But he figures that being the vessel again will fill a hole in his life, or at the very least smother him into oblivion.

He abandons his motel room, but keeps all his charts and data.  Meg may not be interested in Crowley's not-quite-defunct activities, but he thinks it may be worth looking into if this spell thing is a total bust.  He packs it into his stolen car and pulls out a map to start charting a course to Ilchester.


End file.
